Island of the Aunts (8 page)

“I don’t want to. I want my father. I want my mobile tele—”

Fabio yanked his head forward, then pushed it back again hard against the wall, and went on kicking.

“Are you going to come out and work or not?”

“No.”

Fabio kicked again—and suddenly Lambert crumpled up and collapsed on the floor.

“All right,” he blubbered. “I’ll work, but stop it.”

Fabio stopped at once. “Come on, then,” he said. “You can help me muck out the chicken house.”

The aunts saw the boys come. Fabio was carrying the remains of Lambert’s lunch on the tray, including the broken soup bowl.

“You can take it out of my pocket money,” he said, handing them the pieces.

“What pocket money?” asked Aunt Etta.

“Even kidnapped children have to have pocket money,” said Fabio firmly.

So Lambert began to work. He worked badly and he worked slowly. He complained because the television was on the blink and whenever he could, he crept off to look for his mobile telephone which he was sure Myrtle had hidden somewhere. But when he stopped for too long, Fabio just looked at him and he picked up his tools once more.

Everyone agreed that such a tiresome, blathering boy had to be kept away from the unusual creatures—the selkies and the boobrie and the stoorworm—so they gave him jobs to do in the house or with the animals on the farm. But a couple of days after Fabio had beaten him up, Lambert crept down to the shore with a lemonade bottle he had stolen from the larder. Inside the lemonade bottle was a message he had written to his father telling him to come and rescue him, and he was going to throw the bottle into the sea.

But he never got as far as doing that. Instead he dropped the bottle, which smashed on the stones, leaving a dangerous mess of broken glass, and came back to the house blubbering and screaming at the top of his voice.

“I saw a
thing
! I saw a horrible creepy thing!” His whole body shook with terror. He looked as if he was going to have a fit.

“What sort of a thing?” asked Fabio.

He and Minette were sitting at the kitchen table, shelling peas for supper.

“A girl…all queer and horrible. She didn’t have any legs—not any!” He sobbed and gulped again and a runnel of snot ran down his nose.

Minette handed him her handkerchief. “What do you mean, Lambert?” she asked.

“The bottom end of her was a monster. She had a tail all covered in scales. It was growing from her body.” Lambert retched and turned his head away. “I saw it. I
saw
it. I won’t stay here, I won’t!”

Minette and Fabio exchanged troubled glances.

“What was the top of her like?”

“I don’t know…she had sort of green hair—and when I screamed she flopped her tail—I
heard
it flop…” He shuddered. “And then she dived into the water.”

“It sounds like Oona,” said Minette in a low voice. “Of course it would be her—she’s been frightened enough already by that ridiculous Lord Brasenott. I’ll go and comfort her. If only it had been Queenie, she’d have seen Lambert off.”

She slipped out and Fabio was left alone with the blubbering Lambert.

He had had an idea.

“Lambert,” he said. “Listen to this, because it’s important. When Minette and I first came, we saw all sorts of strange creatures—mermaids like you’ve seen and a long slithery worm and a giant bird—oh, all sorts of things—but then we realized they weren’t real. They couldn’t be real because creatures like that don’t exist. I mean, there aren’t any such things as mermaids, are there?”

Lambert had stopped crying. He was actually listening.

“No,” he said. “There aren’t.”

“So what has happened, Lambert, is that you’re imagining them. It’s like having a vision or a dream. And it’s because of something that Art puts in the food. He uses a flour made of seaweed and it has a drug in it that makes you see things. He doesn’t mean to harm us but it’s the only kind of flour you can get here.”

“They aren’t really there?” asked Lambert, sniffing the snot back into his nose. “She wasn’t there—that horrible girl and the awful tail that she flopped with—that wasn’t there either?”

“No it wasn’t. And anything else you see like that will just be a dream. You’ve heard of drugs that give you visions, haven’t you? They’re called halluci—” But here Fabio gave up, not sure of how to pronounce
hallucinogenic
or even if that was the word he meant. “And it’s best not to say anything to anyone—even if you think you see other things. Just don’t take any notice, and if you get back to your father don’t tell him, he’d only laugh at you.”

It worked. Lambert gave a few more gulps; he was still blotched, he was still hiccuping unpleasantly, but he was calm.

And from then on, if Lambert saw anything unusual he was sure it was because of something in the food.

The aunts weren’t happy about Fabio telling lies, but it seemed safer than letting Lambert go screaming all over the Island and hurting the feelings of the creatures that he came upon.

And so the days passed. Minette and Fabio still talked about getting away but they always fell asleep before they could work out how to do it, and slowly the beauty of the place—the great wide skies, the flaming sunsets and the never-ending sound of the sea—seemed to be becoming a part of them.

But meanwhile in London all hell was breaking loose.

Chapter 7

Eight days after Minette ate her drugged cheese and tomato sandwich, Minette’s mother, Mrs Danby, rang Edinburgh to ask if Minette could stay with her father for an extra week. Minette’s term had started but that was not the kind of thing that bothered Mrs Danby.

“I have the chance of a job filming in Paris,” she said.

This wasn’t strictly true. What she did have was yet another boyfriend who said he’d take her to France for a bit of a “jolly”.

Professor Danby, whom she’d interrupted as he was preparing an important lecture on “The Use of the Semi-Colon”, did not at first understand what she was saying.

“I can hardly keep Minette longer, when I haven’t got her,” he said in his dry, irritable voice.

There was a pause at the other end while Mrs Danby fought down the slight fluttering in her stomach.

“Don’t be silly, Philip. I sent Minette to you more than a week ago. She’s been with you since the fifteenth.”

“No, you didn’t. I had a telephone message to say you were keeping her with you and taking her to the seaside. I remember it quite clearly.”

The professor had in fact been rather pleased because the lecture he was giving was part of an important series—“The Use of the Semi-Colon”, “The Use of the Comma”, “The Use of the Paragraph” and so on—and he needed to get on with his work without being bothered by a child.

Now, though, he too began to feel as though his stomach was not quite where it should have been. But of course being the sort of people they were, the Danbys immediately began to blame each other.

“You must be mad, not letting me know she hadn’t arrived.”

“I
must be mad?” hissed the professor.
“You
must be mad. Any normal mother would ring up to see that her daughter had arrived safely.”

“And any normal father would ring and find out why she wasn’t being sent.”

“Are you accusing me of not being normal?” said the professor in a dangerously quiet voice. “A woman who stubbed out her cigarette on a poached egg.”

“It wasn’t a poached egg, it was a fried egg. And if you hadn’t kept turning the lamps off because you were too mean to pay the electricity bill I’d have seen it wasn’t an ashtray. And anyway, how a man who leaves a bath full of scum every time he—”

“Scum!” yelled the professor down the phone. “Are you accusing
me
of leaving scum? Why I couldn’t even get
into
the bath without wading through a heap of your unspeakable toenail clippings.”

They went on like this for some time but then they remembered that their only daughter was missing and pulled themselves together.

“Can she have run away?” wondered Mrs Danby.

“Why should she run away? She has two perfectly good homes.”

“Yes. But she’s been looking a bit peaky. And she sees tigers on the ceiling. Perhaps I should have let her have a nightlight.”

“If every child who sees tigers on the ceiling ran away, there’d be very few children left in their homes,” said the professor.

But obviously the next thing to be done was to go to the police. So Professor Danby went to the police station in Edinburgh and Mrs Danby went to the police station in London. Then she rang her ex-husband and said that the police wanted them to come together and compare their stories exactly.

“You have to come down,” said Mrs Danby. “And quick. They say there’s no time to waste.”

So the professor took the train to London and the next day both of Minette’s parents sat side by side in a taxi on the way to the Metropolitan Police Station.

The officer they saw this time was a high-ranking one, a detective chief superintendent who had a secretary sitting beside him to take everything down.

“Now, I understand that you have heard nothing since your daughter disappeared ten days ago?” he asked. “No messages? No ransom demand?”

Both the Danbys shook their heads.

“I have very little money,” said the professor. “I’m on the staff of the University and they pay abominably. It’s a disgrace how little—”

“And I’m on the dole,” said Mrs Danby, unusually honest. “So even if they asked us for money, it wouldn’t help.”

The detective wrote this down. “Now tell us, please, Mrs Danby, exactly where and when you last saw your daughter.”

“It was at two o’clock on the fifteenth of April. At King’s Cross Station, Platform One. I handed her over to an aunt—”

“Wait a minute!” The superintendent’s eyebrows drew together sharply. “You mean
your
aunt…or
her
aunt…?”

“No.
An
aunt. An aunt from an agency. Minette always travelled with aunts.”

The detective seemed to find this very interesting. “Go and get me the file on the Mountjoy case,” he said to the secretary. “Sergeant Harris has it.” He turned back to the Danbys. “Now tell me from what agency you hired this aunt. It’s an extremely important point.”

Mrs Danby frowned. “Well, generally they came from an agency called
Useful Aunts.
I’ve used them for years—they’re very reliable. But I think…” She rubbed her forehead. “I’m not sure…I think this one may have been labelled
Unusual Aunts.
Yes, I think so. And there was some writing above that which said ‘My Name is Edna’. Or maybe it was Etta.”

“If you hadn’t rotted your brain with tobacco you might be able to remember,” said the professor under his breath.

But at that moment the secretary came back with a blue folder. “Yes,” said the detective as he opened it. “Yes. The two cases are extraordinarily similar.” He looked up at the Danbys. “Another child disappeared on the same day as your daughter and he too was put in the charge of an aunt.
I
think we’re getting somewhere at last!”

The old Mountjoys were always pleased when Hubert-Henry went back to boarding school. They hated having children about and they could never quite forgive their son for having married a foreign dancer in a nightclub and producing such an unsuitable grandson.

Then just a week after Hubert-Henry had left for Greymarsh Towers, a letter came from the headmaster which told old Mr Mountjoy that even though Hubert was not at school because of Burry-Burry fever, the full fees for the term would still have to be paid.

That did it of course. Mr Mountjoy rang the headmaster and said what nonsense was this about Burry-Burry fever and where was the boy, who had been delivered to school on the first day of term?

And the headmaster said, no he hadn’t, the aunt from the agency had told Matron that Hubert-Henry was ill.

So after the old Mountjoys had shouted down the telephone and threatened to sue the headmaster they went to the police. They might not be fond of Hubert-Henry but he was their grandson and their property and if anyone had taken him they wanted to know the reason why.

Which meant the police knew of two cases in which a child had vanished in the care of an aunt and it was now that the Great London Aunt Hunt began.

The police only knew about two aunts because Lambert’s father was still in America, so that the boy had not yet been reported missing. But two aunts were enough to be going on with—and the newspapers and the police and the general public now went slightly mad.

Aunt Plague Menaces the City
screamed the headlines, and
Monster Aunts on Killer Spree!

Once people had been warned they saw these murdering women everywhere.

An aunt was caught outside a supermarket trying to impale a sweet little baby with a giant knitting needle while his mother shopped inside.

“I was only trying to spear a wasp,” she quavered, “I didn’t want it to sting the child.” But she was hauled off to the police station and it was only when they found the back end of the squashed insect in her knitting bag that she was set free.

An even more sinister aunt was seen in Hyde Park, kicking in the head of a little boy who lay in the grass.

“I seen her clear as daylight,” said a fat man who’d been walking his dog and sent for the police. “Kicking like a maniac she was!”

And, “Look how he’s crying, the poor little fellow,” said the other dog owners who had crowded round—and it was true that the boy, holding on to his football,
was
crying. Anyone would cry, seeing their aunt bundled into a police van when she’d been showing them how to curl a penalty into the top right hand corner of the goal. She’d been a striker for the Wolverhampton Under-Eighteens and he thought the world of her.

There was talk in Parliament of a curfew for aunts, forcing them
to
be in bed by eight o’clock; the
Daily Echo
said aunts should be electronically tagged like prisoners—and an elderly lady was arrested in the shoe department of a department store for abusing her great-niece who was trying on shoes for a party.